Mobile phones with digital cameras dominate the worldwide market of mobile devices. Market research data suggests that annual smartphone shipments will grow to 1.87 billion units by 2018, and over 80% of all mobile phones will be arriving to customers with embedded digital cameras. New shipments of camera-enabled smartphones will expand the already massive audience of nearly five billion mobile phone users and over seven billion mobile subscribers. Annual sales of phone cameras to mobile phone manufacturers for embedding into smartphones and feature phones are projected to exceed 1.5 billion units.
The volume of photographs taken with phone cameras is also growing rapidly. Images from smartphone cameras are ubiquitous on all social photo sharing sites. According to recent surveys by Pew Research and other analysts, photographing with phone cameras is the single most popular activity of smartphone owners and is utilized by more than 80% of users, exceeding the use of the next popular category of texting applications. Additionally, according to recent studies, about 27% of all photographs taken with any equipment have been made with smartphone cameras.
Hundreds of millions smartphone users are increasingly incorporating smartphone cameras into their information capturing and processing lifestyles and workflows at work and at home. Digitizing and capturing paper based information is becoming ubiquitous. Thus, a recent survey of smartphone usage by millennials has revealed that 68% of survey respondents have been introduced to mobile information capturing via mobile check deposits, while 83% share an opinion that mobile capture of paper documents will be part of all mobile transactions within the next few years. Business oriented users are capturing with their mobile cameras more and more meeting materials, notes and brainstorms from whiteboards, Moleskine and other paper notebooks, and other handwritten media. For example, a 2015 study of corporate whiteboard users has discovered that 84% of survey participants have a need to store whiteboard content “from time to time”; accordingly, 72% of participants had taken a photograph of a whiteboard at least once, while 29% stored at least 10 images of whiteboards on their camera enabled smartphones or tablets or in associated cloud services.
The arrival of unified multi-platform content management systems, such as the Evernote service and software developed by Evernote Corporation of Redwood City, Calif., is aimed at capturing, storing, displaying and modifying all types and formats of information across a variety of user devices. The Evernote service and software and similar systems have facilitated and stimulated taking photographs or mobile scans of typed and handwritten text, documents, forms, checks, charts, drawings and other types and formats of real-life content with smartphone cameras; a dedicated Scannable application, also developed by Evernote Corporation, facilitates capturing of documents, whiteboards, handwritten notes, etc.
Content entered by users with smartphones, other cameras or scanners is initially stored in a content management system as a raster image. Visual appearance of the content plays a significant role in user satisfaction and productivity. Notwithstanding significant progress in hardware, including camera resolution, in targeting and auto-focusing technologies, in image stabilization and other quality improvements for capturing technologies, a significant portion of image content photographed by users suffers from a variety of defects. This may be especially damaging for photographs of line art produced via conventional handwriting and drawing that utilizes ball pens, pencils, whiteboard markers and other writing tools. Various artefacts such as uneven brightness and gaps in continuous handwritten lines due to varying pressure and shortcomings of writing tools, jitter and photo capturing noise, blurry line intersections, letter and shape connections and other flaws unfavorably affect usability of handwritten media captured from paper as photographed images in a variety of formats.
Accordingly, it is useful to develop methods and systems for improving visual quality of photographs with handwritten content.